“Come back!” I sobbed. My voice circled round the cooling towers and smokestacks.Come back. Come back. Come. Back. I sunk down in the weeds and hugged my knees. I felt the cell phone in my pocket and pulled it out. I was on the southeast corner of the island, where I might pick up a cell signal from Waldron or Orwell. The phone lit up and my eyes blinked shut. I thought I was dreaming; there was one bar. I dialed Carey’s number. The ringing was jarring. It continued to ring, sometimes cracking up. On the last ring there was a break, then voicemail.
The words I wanted to say and the words that came out of my mouth may not have been the same, I couldn’t tell. There was a body in the barn; not the graveyard, where the babies are, the barn. They fed me poisonous mushrooms. They fed me dead baby mushrooms. They feed the dead to mushrooms. I was incoherent, not sobbing. I stared around me in the weeds. They were flecked with down and feathers, fish bones. I picked at them. Bald eagles slept a hundred feet over my head in their smokestack nest. I looked up, as if I might see them. When I looked down, I realized I had dropped my phone. The light on its screen went out, but I found it in the weeds. I put it back in my wet shirt pocket.
I wandered into the woods. I listened for the sound of the ocean and kept it to my right this time. My right. I found a sheltered place and clung to a tree that looked out over a bluff onto the water. I could just make out waves, I thought. Reflecting something. A deranged glowing orb in the sky. The moon, idiot. Just sleep. I wrapped my whole body around the tree. Hugging it with my legs, pressing my face to the bark. I held on to it and prayed that it would hold me till morning, though some part of me didn’t care.
I felt myself falling and woke. My face was in the moss and salal. There was light in the sky, still gray. A light rain fell, but I was sheltered by low branches. I was three feet from a sheer drop to the rocky shore.
I scooted myself away from the bluff, used branches to pull myself up. My legs were weak and my head swam, but I felt warm. I was aware enough to know that I might be hypothermic. I went slowly, weaving and holding on to any bush or tree sturdy enough to support me, and in this way I found the road. I wasn’t sure which way to walk, so I went right. When I found an old trail marker, I knew I had reached the outer edge of Fort Union. I followed the road to the end, the entrance to the park on one side, the path through the trees to the Colony on the other. What time was it? Would they be awake? The way was clear, through the trees, and in the light of day, the effects of the mushrooms wearing off. I wasn’t afraid anymore of what they would do to me when I made it back. At the hill above the kitchen on the bluff, I scooted down on my butt, afraid I would fall headfirst down it. A few bodies were moving about in the drizzle, heads down, deep in their work prayers. I crept to the doors of the chapel and lay down, tried to turn on my dead phone, dropped it. After a while: the approach of a boat on the water below, the bellow of someone’s voice breaking their vow of silence. I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t say a word.
Thirteen. THE WOODS
MALHEUR NATIONAL FOREST, OREGON
JULY 12, 2016
CAREY’S WORKING LONG hours, helping organize the fire crews, coordinating with the Bureau of Land Management and the National Interagency Fire Center. Sometimes he’s on call at the cabin; sometimes he just doesn’t come home. They have cots in the back of the station and take turns catching a couple hours’ sleep each when fires are burning. They’re already working on two fires, one near homes to the northeast in the Umatilla, outside Baker City, threatening farms and houses. A smaller one in the Ochoco. These are all far enough away that his station is merely on alert; ready to pitch in if needed.
It’s been the warmest, driest season on record, with the lowest snowpacks in the mountain ranges, with more of these drought years expected to follow. I listen to the talk back and forth at the station. A few smoke-detecting cameras have been set up in some forests, but not all — not out here. The early summer heat is already toasting the undergrowth, and the warm waters out over the Pacific have been creating unseasonable storms, coming inland — breaking out over the Cascades, dumping their moisture in the valley, but not their velocity, not their electricity. Lightning strikes cause fires some of the time — most of the time it’s people, campfires and cigarettes and sparks from railways, fireworks. Then the storms bring winds that spread the fires, whip them up higher and toss them across containment lines, create their own weather systems, massive heat and smoke storms that can be seen from space.
They’re manning the fire lookouts this year — the ones they normally rented out to backpackers. I convince Carey to let me man the lookout I’ve been going to all spring. His boss says, “Sure, that’s great.” But Carey says he’ll keep looking for another volunteer.
He goes over how to use the CB radio again. It’s a silver and wood laminate box, covered in knobs and little red and green lights, a frequency meter. I suspect the machine is older than both of us.
The first rule is “Just don’t touch any of these knobs.” He gestures to an area of the box with buttons and abbreviations like RB and ANL. “Just don’t bother. There’s a manual somewhere if you get desperate, but just remember: Channel nine for emergency calls, that’s the station dispatcher. If no one answers, try nineteen — you might get a trucker on Highway 7 who can get a call through to some other station’s dispatch. After that, just try all the stations. But be patient. Always come back to nine.”
He sends a test call to dispatch at the station. It’s Darlene, the office manager for the Forest Service. She sounds like she’s been eating something, but maybe it’s just the interference. “Weather disturbs transmissions all the time. Certain conditions can bounce a call off the ionosphere and send it hundreds of miles away,” he says.
I give an impressed whistle. “Win for Mother Earth,” I say.
Carey shakes his head.
“I’ll come up on my days off—”
“If you get any days off,” I say.
We heat some beans and kielbasa and eat on the deck and watch the sunset. I light citronella coils, and we sit at the edge, legs dangling. We don’t talk; we take in the view and the air. When we’re done, I take our plates inside and bring a camp blanket out, wrap us both in it while we drink cans of Oly.
“Do you miss the firefighting,” I ask him, “when you’re at the station pushing paper and dispatching?”